TEESPORTS 2012 – A massive success.

So a little thing called Teesports happened this weekend.

It was an enormous success.

Four games, each with 26 to 32 competitors and a straight double elimination bracket ran to top 4 in six hours.  Everyone seemed to have a great time and the matches were awesome to watch. We have some great footage and pictures from the event which are mostly working their way on to the Teesside Fight Club facebook page. This event was made to be as awesome as it through the sheer strength of the community. So many players brought equipment, consoles, monitors and helped organize matches and make sure everything went smoothly. For our very first large-ish scale event it ran fantastically well.

This was hardly my doing, I had a super star team of people who the event would have crumbled without.

First off I want to thank two of the biggest unsung heroes of the whole event. One is my buddy Lee ‘Flicky’ Reeves who just fancied coming down for the sake of it and ended up running and managing entire brackets worth of win reports, station assignments and match call-outs. He ran an incredibly well oiled machine and spent much of the day behind a laptop marking free / in use set ups and calling out games to be played. Without any instruction to so he quickly threw together a system that made the whole event run practically like clockwork.

The other is Mike ‘MetallicMike’ Sene. Again with really no obligation to do so he had the initiative and general management talent to look after so many aspects of the tournament that I struggle to even recount them all. From working with skirmish to set up our whole stage set up, getting games and set ups swapped over during finals and scheduling the whole event to just always being prepared to take action and make a solid call or decision whenever we ran into a problem. He was basically instrumental in keeping the event on target.

I’ve had a lot of thanks and praise for the quality of the event, when really a huge share of the tournament management on the day came down to these two guys, neither of whom have gotten enough credit for it. So shout outs to them.

Of course, enormous thanks to Will Ho for sourcing the amazing venue that made the whole event possible and sustainable. He also put a huge amount of commitment into raising and raising the quality of the day. He got into contact with Namco surrounding some awesome tekken prizes, spent time in middlesbrough, driving back and forth between places to help patch xboxes and bring equipment to and from the venue where I couldn’t, and even invested his own money into getting some awesome trophies for the event, so that our winners had something to forever remember the day by. The event quite literally wouldn’t have happened without this dude.

That’s not all by a long shot, General Skirmish travelled north for a stupid number of hours just to provide us with a free high quality recording set up for our stage games. He provided and managed all of the equipment and recorded our finals like it was just standard business. He went so far out of his way just to support a fledgling FG scene in the north-east. A man of the people.

All of the TFC regulars and ‘OG’s also helped out wherever they could when it came to set ups, equipment, brackets and so on. In no particular order shout outs to Clangers, Chubsie, Segazoom, Roboduck, Nathan Hendry, Rueake, Paperdoll, Guy Snead, ParmoPaul, Hadoshrooms, Nevillebamshew, BeyondTheVoid, MrMokuchu, Zafinasaur and anybody I might have missed.

Special shout outs to Nev and Alfie, for producing the godlike high quality Teesports T-shirts (and others) that tons of the players were wearing by the end of the day. Shout outs to Nathan for booking out Kebabish, who were happy to provide a huge chunk of their establishment for us to have an awesome after meal that closed out the day perfectly. And also shout outs to Phil Beveridge, for providing an enormous high res print out of our event poster totally free of charge.

Huge props of course to everyone from the Manchester scene for coming down in force, providing even more set ups and games, putting on a great show in the tournaments, providing frankly unequaled crowd hype and practically doubling the number of participants. You guys are the best. On the same note, special thanks to our competitors from all over the UK who came down and put on one hell of a performance in the tournaments. Giga D, Bigfool and others, I’m looking at you guys!

Thank you to the venue managers for being super helpful, understanding and easy to work with and for providing awesome free tea and coffee during the set ups stages of the tournament.

Thank you of course to Reflections and Namco for providing awesome prizes to help make the event that much more memorable.

Thanks additionally to Unequalled Media’s Shin Dragon for providing KoF DLC codes that helped us get through that bracket much faster.

And overall, thank you to everybody who came down and took part. This event succeeded through the charity and dedication of everybody who wanted it to succeed. Which was pretty much god damn everyone. I’ve almost certainly forgotten to thank someone who did something awesome, because so many people did it’s ridiculous. Everyone put in so much work and made the event happen. You’re all amazing.

When we announced the tournament we were expecting to run another small scale local tournament for our scene with about 15-25 dudes. Instead we got more than double that. We were prepared initially to run the event at a loss just to make it as awesome as we could, in the end thanks to you guys we walked away with over £100 in profits and the event was still awesome.

That money you spent is an investment. Every penny is going towards providing you guys with an even better experience at whatever we run next whenever is best to run it.

So shout outs to everybody. Shout outs to fighting games. Shout outs to shout outs.

No shout outs to DLC.